Mahdi Tavakoli
Mahdi Tavakoli is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Biomedical Engineering Department and a Senior University of Alberta Engineering Research Chair in Healthcare Robotics. He is also Co-Director of the Mechatronics & Robotics Co-op Engineering Program at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, in 2005. From 2006 to 2008, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics (CSTAR), Canada, and an NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University, USA. His research interests involve medical robotics, image-guided surgery, and rehabilitation robotics. Mahdi is the lead author of Haptics for Teleoperated Surgical Robotic Systems (World Scientific, 2008) and the Specialty Chief Editor for Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Robot Design Section). He is a Senior Member of IEEE and an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Robotics Research, IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, and Journal of Medical Robotics Research.
Selected Publications
Zargarzadeh, S., Okanlawon, J., Mirzaei, M., Mohammadi, M., & Tavakoli, M. (2026). Enhanced reasoning and task planning for surgical autonomy using multi-modal large language models with gradual learning (external link) . Biomimetic Intelligence and Robotics, 6(1), 100277.
Zargarzadeh, S., Mirzaei, M., Ou, Y., & Tavakoli, M. (2024). From Decision to Action in Surgical Autonomy: Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Robot-Assisted Blood Suction. (external link) arXiv.
Castellanos-Cruz, J. L., Gómez-Medina, M. F., Tavakoli, M., Pilarski, P., & Adams, K. D. (2022). Preliminary testing of eye gaze interfaces for controlling a haptic system intended to support play in children with physical impairments: Attentive versus explicit interfaces (external link) . Journal of Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies Engineering, 9.